


Seal the Change

by DA830



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Friends, Gen, directionless, kind of fluffyish, me derping around with the concept of childhood friends au!gaius/robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 11:24:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11401515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DA830/pseuds/DA830
Summary: Once upon a time, Robin was obsessed with marine animals and Gaius was too laid back for his own good. All it takes is some clay to make them stick together.





	Seal the Change

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly directionless. If you didn't see in the tags, this is me fooling around with the AU in a short-ish drabble.  
> It doesn't make sense, you say? That's 'cause I'm high on procrastination, like Gaius.

The first time he saw her, it was alone, perched on a rock, face buried deep in a chapter book.

Recess was a time of freedom, a time of play, so it didn’t occur to him why anyone would spend it reading, when you could do that in the ten minutes they were given in class.

He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and grabbed the ball he had kicked away, shouting back to his friends’ grating calls to hurry up. He glanced once more at the strange girl with snow-white hair before running off, brushing the ends of his headband out of the way.

Weird.

 

 

The first time she saw him, it was with two bruised knees and a white stick poking out of his mouth.

She was smart - she knew that. She was only in first grade and she already knew her times tables up to nine, she knew how to spell ‘rhythm’ and ‘comfortable’, she usually surprised her teacher, Miss Emmeryn, with her rare but deep contributions to the class discussions.

She could read books really well, but she could read people better.

A lot of people told her, Miss Emmeryn included, that she was very mature for her age. She’d then looked up ‘mature’ in the dictionary and decided that it was something to be proud of, if she spoke like she was an adult and acted older than she really was, but maybe she wouldn’t brag about it and let people figure it out for themselves.

It wasn’t like she could help it, though. She knew when her classmates were feeling bad, noticed their sadness when no one else would, and sometimes she would try to help them, but it never ended well. So, she eventually stopped trying.

Did it bother her that she knew but didn’t help? It bothered her more that no one else knew.

Was she special?

At recess, she would read. Alone, because no one talked to her in class nor outside. Everyone played, some got dirty while playing with the ball. If there was one thing she hated the most, it was getting her clothes dirty. Reading was a clean activity.

She didn’t look up when the ball rolled past her, but started when she heard her classmates’ cries to get it back. She had to mentally remove herself from the book, Plegian Summer (a gripping tale by acclaimed author H.N. Sorcerio, of two children in olden times maintaining a friendship through the war), only to catch a boy whipping past her towards the stray ball.

So the call wasn’t for her, after all. She observed the boy’s appearance; bright, eye-scalding orange hair, dark green headband that fell into his eyes, some sort of white stick in his mouth. A lollipop, maybe?

She frowned. Running with food in your mouth is dangerous, she could hear herself say, perhaps in a friendly tone, so he knew she didn’t want to insult him, but decided against it in favour of returning to the book.

She shook her head once and resumed where her mind had left off.

 

"The sky was a mix of emotion, her heart was a golden yellow, red, orange. The look in his eyes was everything she had seen before and more…"

 

 

“What animal do you want to do?”

There. There he was, the boy with the orange hair and green headband, this time without the lollipop in his mouth. He was standing, and she noticed more scrapes and bruises than before on his legs.

“Seal,” she replied almost immediately. She’d been prepping for this animal study project a while back, using her recesses to stock up on valuable information about the slippery marine mammal.

“Can I sit?” He pointed to the now-empty chair beside her, showing no sign that he had heard. She nodded.

Her folder was open in front of her, and she mindfully slid it over to rest on the crack between the two desks. There was the project outline and the rubric that no one ever read.

“Do you like seals?” was his first question. She almost responded by introducing herself, but stopped just in time. Miss Emmeryn had already put them together, Robin with Gaius. Was that his name?

“I think they’re very c-cool. I want to do seals,” she stressed. She had it all planned out, her project - their project - would be the very best.

To her immense relief, he shrugged nonchalantly. “Let’s do it, then. How do we start?”

She looked down at the paper, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. This was the first time she hadn’t been argued against, or told she was too bossy…

“Miss Emmeryn gave us the chart that we have to fill out, and we also have to make a diorama with the habitat.”

“Wait, what’s a diorama?” He peered at the paper, as if hoping to find an explanation. A stray hair tickled her cheek as he leant over.

She drew back slightly, trying not to let her irritation show. Why couldn’t she be matched with someone a bit more knowledgeable?

“She said to make it out of clay, like, make the actual animal and where it lives and put it in a box so everyone can see it.”

“Oh! I’m good at that stuff!” He broke into a smile with a confident air about it. “What if I do the diaphragm and you do the writing?”

Diorama, she thought, but she knew it would be rude to correct him.

Well, if she left him to the clay, she would have less things to worry about, allowing her to focus more on the writing and detail, plus she wouldn’t have to get her hands dirty with the clay, or plasticine, whatever they were using…

“Sure!”

 

 

It had never once occurred to her that she was reading into it way too much for a first-grade project.

If only she could have the same mindset, same amount of dedication for her current assignments…

“Oh my gods, you still keep this?”

“What is it?”

Gaius turned from his lounging spot on the bed, put down the book he was supposed to be reading, and caught Robin’s inquiring look.

“What, what?”

“It’s our first project together! Come, look!”

He heaved a sigh and hopped off the bed, stepping over the mess of clothes on the floor and towards the closet. He knew he should have thrown out that...that abomination a long time ago, but for reasons unknown, he hadn’t yet.

Maybe they weren’t unknown, necessarily.

“Get outta the closet!”

She smirked back at him, arms buried shoulder-deep in his hangers. “Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?”

“Shut up,” he grumbled. “Bring it out here.”

He watched as she untangled herself from his collection of unworn clothes, holding gently in her hands a shoebox. A certain Valentia brand shoebox that housed something far worse than his nightmares.

“No, I changed my mind, put it back in there. Better yet, throw it in a fire or something.”

Anything but facing that.

“Aw,” she pouted, lower lip thrown out exaggeratedly. “It holds so many memories for me - us, though!”

“You take it, then!” He quickly backtracked as she advanced on him menacingly, still holding the box reverently. He felt his legs hit the bed and flopped backwards, leaving his stomach exposed.

“Yeah, I will! Let’s just revisit our past selves first.” She raised her right eyebrow knowingly and another smirk crept onto her lips.

“Oh, no…” He flipped around, grabbing a pillow and throwing it over his head. “Okay, go ahead.”

Silence.

And then -

“Oh - oh my gods! Every single time - I swear - it gets funnier -”

She was probably rolling on his clothes-ridden floor by now in laughter. He felt a weight press into the bed beside him, then a heavy drop and the sound of her pure laughter.

There it was.

Presently, the bane of his entire existence.

“You gonna stop anytime soon?” He posed the question gruffly, but he couldn’t bring himself to be really mad at her.

“We thought we were so cool,” she choked out, gasping for air. Her still-white hair, usually long and straight and neat, was in a mess, fanned out around her head.

He cracked a small smile at that. “I mean, we were pretty cool when we presented it to the class. What did you say? ‘I had nothing to do with the diorama’? That was pretty cool,” he repeated, knowing that would grate on her nerves.

She bolted upright, looking him straight in the eye. Her laughter stopped, and he braced himself for the inevitable merciless comeback.

“Your seal will forever haunt my dreams.”

Upon hearing that, he pressed two palms to his forehead in defeat and lay back down, recalling the first-grade memories. Nine years ago, and it still remained fresh.

With her mirthful cries in the background, each detail of their project came back in full. He’d spent so long shaping the seal after doing the background, he probably should not have spent that long on a first-grade project (it was honestly the most work he’d ever put into anything), and even then, he hadn’t had enough time to put accurate facial features on it, so he’d slapped a few balls onto it and called it a face.

Apparently, it looked funny enough to make the entire class laugh their butts off.

It was also the first time he’d heard Robin’s laugh, and from then on, he resolved to hear that sound as much as possible.

That vow had been unusually strong for a slacker like him, but he didn’t regret a thing.

“Don’t worry, I can make a better one now,” he joked, sitting up, but there was weight behind his words. After taking a few art classes in his elementary school days, he realized that his love and skill for making sweets and preparing them could be transferred to sculpting and drawing.

“I’d like to believe I’ve changed quite a bit,” he murmured as an afterthought. Hopefully years of art lessons had made its way through to his head.

Robin’s reaction was instantaneous. She rushed forward and grabbed his shoulders, not unusual by her standards, but it still took him by surprise, and her face was forlorn.

“You call me Robin nowadays.”

Her statement only served to leave him further in the dark. He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you have another name I don’t know about?”

She gave him another meaningful look, this time accompanied with a slight push, causing both of them to edge back on the bed a tiny bit.

Then it hit him. He’d changed.

“...you don’t mean… ‘Bubbles’, do you?”

At once, her face lit up and a smile returned. “Just like old times!”

He gave her a questioning glance, propping his arms up behind him as to keep stable from the weight she was pushing onto him. “It’s not, like, a turn-on or something, right? Is that why you’re so fixated on it?”

The pressure on his shoulders disappeared and it was her turn to back away a couple of steps, shaking her head obstinately and waving her hand. “No, no, of course not. I was just...reminiscing on it. You gave everyone nicknames,” she added, and the smile turned fond.

“Yeah, and I still use them,” he grinned. “Sure seems to get on Maribelle’s nerves, at least.”

“Jeez…” Robin shook her head in mock defeat. “I wish things were as simple now as they were back then.”

The mood sobered up quickly and they both fell silent.

He didn’t think much about the past, but he knew the opposite was quite true for his best friend. He knew it when her eyes became unfocused, devoid of their usual intensity, when her fingers became restless and tapped on whatever she could find, this time her elbow, when her mouth thinned into a line of harsh reality, he knew he had to bring her back to the harsher reality they lived in.

“Hey, Bubbles. Wanna study?”

“I’d rather stew in my angsty emotions,” she deadpanned, but he could see he’d reached her. A soft smile, the gentlest of all he’d seen today, was her expression. “But sure. Math test on Monday, remember?”

“That’s why I wanna study!”

He slid down onto the floor and rested his head against the bed, gratefully accepting the heavy textbook from Robin and flipping it open to the page he last remembered doing.

She assumed a more casual position, lying down, back to the air, pressing the clothes on the floor flat and spread the textbook out in front of her. He’d have to clean that up later.

“So I was thinking, we should start with the textbook because it’s probably longer, and harder, and then the course pack, because it has review for the whole unit, but no calculators…”

People changed. He got that, and he’d been with Robin through her change, through the suck outs, through the fall outs, but he had always been there to pull her back. To think that once upon a time, a six-year-old would see her reading and call her ‘weird’...and years later, she would become his confidant, his best friend, the one to pull him back from the brink of giving up.

But that’s what friends are for, isn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> Shoot me an FE pairing and I'll try to write a childhood friends thing about it! They won't end up all like this one, hopefully.  
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
